An unmanaged Microsoft 365 environment is more than just a financial drain; it’s a significant security risk. Licenses assigned to former employees become “ghost users”—unmonitored backdoors into your network. At the same time, active employees might lack the security features needed to protect sensitive client data. This raises a critical question for Tampa businesses: how should businesses evaluate Microsoft 365 licensing before renewal? The evaluation must be treated as a crucial security and compliance check. It involves auditing not just for cost savings, but to ensure every user has the right level of protection, closing gaps that could lead to a data breach.
Key Takeaways
- Right-size your licenses: Stop paying for features people don’t use by matching licenses to specific job functions. A frontline worker likely only needs Business Basic, while an executive handling sensitive data may require the security of a Premium or E5 plan.
- Audit your usage to find savings: Use the reports in your M365 Admin Center to find easy wins. Look for licenses assigned to former employees, inactive accounts, and users with premium plans who only use basic apps to uncover immediate savings.
- Make reviews a routine process: Treat license management as a quarterly check-in, not a yearly scramble. By regularly cleaning up your licenses and documenting your usage, you’ll have the data you need to confidently negotiate better renewal terms.
What Are the Microsoft 365 License Types?
Choosing the right Microsoft 365 license is one of the most effective ways to control your IT spending. Microsoft organizes its plans into two main families: Business (for organizations with up to 300 users) and Enterprise (for larger companies or those with complex needs). Picking the wrong plan often means paying for features your team will never use or, worse, leaving your business exposed without critical security tools. As a Microsoft Partner, we help Tampa businesses sort through these options every day. The key is to match the license to the specific needs of each employee role, not to take a one-size-fits-all approach. Let’s break down the most common plans so you can see where your money is going.
Compare: Business Basic vs. Standard vs. Premium
The Business plans are the most common choice for small to medium-sized businesses. Each tier builds on the last, adding more functionality.
- Business Basic: This is the entry-level, cloud-only plan. Users get web and mobile versions of Office apps (Word, Excel, etc.), email hosting, and Microsoft Teams. It’s a great fit for employees who are always on the go or don’t need the full desktop software, like field technicians or front-desk staff.
- Business Standard: This plan includes everything in Basic but adds the downloadable desktop versions of the Office app suite. This is the workhorse license for most office-based employees, such as accountants or marketing managers who rely on the advanced features in desktop Excel or PowerPoint.
- Business Premium: This top-tier business plan contains everything in Standard, plus advanced cybersecurity and device management tools like Microsoft Defender and Intune. If your Tampa law firm or healthcare practice handles sensitive client data, this plan is essential for protecting that information and managing the devices that access it.
Compare: Enterprise E3 vs. E5 Licenses
Enterprise plans are built for organizations with more than 300 users or those with advanced security and compliance requirements.
- Enterprise E3: Think of E3 as the enterprise-grade version of Business Premium. It offers robust security and management features but scales them for larger, more complex environments. It includes more advanced tools for legal compliance and information protection, making it a solid foundation for corporations or large healthcare systems that need centralized control over their data and devices.
- Enterprise E5: This is the most comprehensive and secure Microsoft 365 license available. It includes everything in E3 and adds Microsoft’s most advanced security suite, business analytics with Power BI, and voice capabilities within Teams. The jump in cost from E3 to E5 is significant, so it’s typically reserved for organizations with a C-suite that needs advanced analytics or those in highly regulated industries requiring the highest level of threat protection.
Key Features That Drive Your Costs
When you review your licenses, the price differences almost always come down to a few key capabilities. Before your renewal, ask yourself which of these features your employees actually need to do their jobs effectively.
- Desktop vs. Web Apps: Do your employees need the full-featured desktop versions of Office, or can they get their work done using the web-based versions? Answering this is the easiest way to decide between Basic and Standard plans.
- Advanced Security: Do you handle sensitive client information, financial data, or patient records? If so, the advanced threat protection and data loss prevention tools in Business Premium or the Enterprise plans are non-negotiable.
- Device Management: Do you need to secure and manage company data on employee laptops and personal mobile phones? The inclusion of Microsoft Intune in the Premium, E3, and E5 plans is the feature that enables this control.
What Are the Hidden Costs of Not Auditing Your Licenses?
Failing to regularly audit your Microsoft 365 licenses is like leaving a tap running; you don’t notice the impact until you get the bill. These hidden costs go beyond just the monthly subscription fee. They show up as wasted budget on unused software, security vulnerabilities from improperly assigned features, and surprise compliance penalties. For many Tampa businesses we work with, a proactive license review uncovers savings of 15% to 30% annually. These are funds that can be reinvested into growth, cybersecurity, or other critical IT needs.
A continuous review process prevents the last-minute scramble before your annual renewal. Instead of making rushed decisions, you can approach your renewal with clear data on exactly what you need, what you don’t, and where you can optimize.
The Cost of Unused Licenses and Redundant Features
One of the most common sources of wasted IT spend is paying for licenses that are either completely unused or assigned to employees who only use a fraction of the included features. This often happens when an employee leaves the company and their license isn’t de-provisioned, creating a “ghost user” that you continue to pay for month after month. Similarly, you might have team members with a premium license who only ever open Outlook and Teams. You’re paying for advanced tools like Power BI or Microsoft Defender for Endpoint that they never touch. A regular audit identifies these unused and underutilized licenses, allowing you to reclaim them. With ongoing managed IT support, this becomes a continuous process, not a once-a-year headache.
How Over-Licensing Roles Inflates Your Budget
Assigning the wrong license tier to an employee is another major budget drain. For example, a frontline worker at a manufacturing plant or a part-time paralegal may only need access to email, file storage, and team chat. Giving them a high-end Enterprise E5 license is overkill and unnecessarily expensive. The goal isn’t to take away tools people need; it’s to “right-size” their license to match their actual job functions. By analyzing usage data, you can ensure that your engineers have the advanced tools they require while your administrative staff has the basics. This strategic approach to Microsoft 365 licensing ensures you aren’t overspending and that every dollar contributes directly to productivity.
The Risk of Surprise True-Up Costs and Compliance Gaps
If your business uses a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, you’re familiar with the annual “true-up” process, where you pay for any licenses you added during the year. Without consistent tracking, this can result in a massive, unexpected bill. Worse, if Microsoft initiates a software audit and finds you’re using software you aren’t licensed for, the penalties can be severe. Beyond financial risk, a lack of license management creates security holes. An audit might reveal that critical users don’t have licenses with necessary security features like multi-factor authentication or advanced threat protection. Closing these gaps is essential for a strong cybersecurity posture and protecting your business from evolving threats.
How Do You Audit Your Microsoft 365 License Usage?
A thorough license audit is the single most effective way to cut your Microsoft 365 spending. Instead of guessing what your team needs, an audit gives you concrete data to make informed decisions before your renewal date. It’s a straightforward process of pulling your usage data, analyzing key metrics, and cleaning up the results to get a true picture of your environment. This process reveals exactly where your money is going and uncovers opportunities to reallocate licenses, downgrade plans, and eliminate waste. By following these steps, you can walk into your renewal negotiation with the evidence you need to secure the right licenses at the right price.
Pull Usage Data from the M365 Admin Center
Your first stop is the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. This is where you can access built-in reports that provide a baseline understanding of your license landscape. Navigate to the “Reports” section and then to “Usage.” Here, you can generate reports that show all your licenses, including those that are inactive, unused, or assigned to accounts that no longer exist. Look for the “Microsoft 365 apps usage” report to see which users are active on which services. This initial data pull is crucial for spotting low-hanging fruit, like licenses assigned to employees who haven’t logged in for over 90 days. It gives you a foundational list to work from for deeper analysis.
Get Deeper Insights with Power BI and Graph API
While the Admin Center reports are a good start, they don’t always tell the whole story. For a more granular view, you can connect your usage data to Power BI. This allows you to create custom dashboards that visualize usage trends across different departments and roles. For even deeper analysis, our team often uses the Microsoft Graph API to pull specific data points that aren’t available in the standard reports. This approach helps you gather and clean your data, getting all your license and usage information from Microsoft 365 to build a complete picture. This advanced step is perfect for businesses with complex licensing needs who want to ensure no dollar is wasted.
What Metrics Should You Track Before Renewal?
Knowing what data to look for is just as important as knowing how to get it. Many companies pay for premium features that are never touched. To avoid this, you need to track exactly which apps and services people are actually using, and how much.
Focus on these key metrics:
- Last Activity Date: Identify users who haven’t used their account in 30, 60, or 90 days.
- Service-Specific Usage: See who is using premium services like Power BI Pro, Teams Phone, or advanced security features.
- Assigned vs. Used: Compare the services included in a user’s license (like E5) to the services they actually use. If an E5 user only uses Outlook and Teams, they are a prime candidate for a downgrade.
This data provides the evidence needed to right-size licenses across your organization.
How to Clean and Validate Your Data
An audit is only as good as the data it’s based on. Before making any decisions, you must clean and validate the information you’ve pulled. This involves cross-referencing your license list with your HR directory to find and remove licenses assigned to former employees, a common source of wasted spend. Next, you should identify and consolidate any duplicate accounts. Finally, filter out inactive accounts and service mailboxes that may be consuming a full license unnecessarily. This data hygiene step ensures the numbers you present during your renewal are accurate and defensible, strengthening your position. It’s a critical part of the IT consulting we provide to Tampa businesses.
How to Match M365 Licenses to Employee Roles
The single biggest way to control your Microsoft 365 spending is to stop treating all employees the same. A one-size-fits-all approach leads to wasted money on features people never use. A role-based strategy ensures everyone has the right tools without overspending.
Map Features to Specific Job Functions
Start by looking at what your employees actually do. An accountant who lives in Excel needs different tools than a field technician who only uses Teams and Outlook on a mobile device. Match licenses to specific job functions, not just departments. This simple shift prevents you from paying for premium features for employees who only need the basics. Our IT consulting services can help you analyze these workflows to identify the right feature sets for each role.
Create User Categories: High-Need vs. Low-Need
Group your users into a few key categories based on their technology needs. For example: “Frontline Workers” (Business Basic), “Office Staff” (Business Standard), and “Power Users” who need advanced security and analytics (Business Premium or E5). Creating these personas makes it much easier to assign the right license level and avoid over-provisioning. It turns a complex task into a manageable process.
Define Security Needs for Each Role
Licensing is also a critical part of your security. Roles that handle sensitive client information, financial data, or patient records require licenses with stronger security controls. For instance, a law firm needs the advanced threat protection and data loss prevention in higher-tier plans. Aligning licenses with data sensitivity ensures you meet compliance requirements and protect your business. We help businesses implement robust cybersecurity frameworks tied directly to their licensing strategy.
Avoid the “One-License-Fits-All” Trap
The most common mistake is giving everyone a high-end license “just in case.” Handing out E5 licenses to employees who only need email and Word is an expensive habit. A construction company, for example, could save thousands by equipping site managers with Business Standard instead of E5. Regularly reviewing and right-sizing your licenses is a core part of effective managed IT support and keeps your budget in check.
What Is a Step-by-Step M365 License Review Process?
An annual Microsoft 365 license review is one of the most effective ways to control your IT budget. Instead of just accepting the auto-renewal, you can follow a structured process to make sure you’re only paying for what your team actually needs and uses. This isn’t just about cutting costs; it’s about optimizing your investment to get the right tools into the right hands. A thorough review gives you a clear, data-backed picture of your organization’s software usage, which is powerful information to have during renewal negotiations.
As a Microsoft Certified Partner, we guide Tampa businesses through this exact process. It breaks down into five clear, manageable steps that turn a complex task into a straightforward audit. By following this framework, you can identify savings, improve productivity, and eliminate compliance risks associated with improper licensing. This proactive approach ensures your Microsoft 365 environment is efficient, secure, and perfectly aligned with your business goals.
Step 1: Pull Your Full License Inventory
First, you need a complete picture of every license you own. This means generating a report from your M365 Admin Center that lists all active, inactive, and unassigned licenses. Think of it as a foundational inventory check. You’re looking for redundancies, like duplicate licenses assigned to a single user, or ghost licenses still active for former employees. This initial data pull often reveals immediate savings. For example, we frequently find businesses paying for 5-10% more licenses than they have active employees. A clear inventory is the essential starting point for any meaningful analysis.
Step 2: Compare Usage Reports to Active Users
With your inventory in hand, the next step is to see what people are actually doing with their licenses. The M365 Admin Center provides usage reports that show which applications each person uses, from Teams and SharePoint to Exchange and OneDrive. Cross-reference this activity data with your license list. You will likely find employees with premium licenses who only use email and Word, or users who haven’t logged into certain apps in over 90 days. This analysis helps you spot over-licensed employees and identify features that your team isn’t taking advantage of.
Step 3: Group Users by Role and Required Features
Avoid the common mistake of applying a one-size-fits-all license to everyone. Instead, group your employees into personas based on their job functions. For instance, a partner at a law firm has very different software needs than a paralegal or an administrative assistant. Your sales team might need advanced CRM integrations, while your field technicians in a construction firm primarily need mobile access to Teams and email. By creating these user categories, you can map specific M365 features to what each role truly requires to be effective, ensuring you don’t overpay for unnecessary tools.
Step 4: Adjust Your License Mix
Now it’s time to right-size your licenses based on your findings. This doesn’t always mean downgrading. If you find a user with an E5 license isn’t using its advanced security features, the solution might be training, not an immediate downgrade. Unlocking the full potential of a powerful license can deliver a great return. However, if a user’s role simply doesn’t require those premium features, reassigning them to a more appropriate, cost-effective license makes sense. This strategic adjustment ensures your IT spending is directly tied to operational needs and employee productivity.
Step 5: Document Changes for Your Renewal Talks
Finally, document every change you’ve made. Keep a clear record of reclaimed licenses from former employees, users you’ve reassigned to different tiers, and the data that justifies each decision. This documentation is your leverage. When you enter renewal negotiations with Microsoft or your provider, you’ll have a data-driven case for your exact needs. Instead of guessing, you can confidently state, “We require 85 Business Standard licenses, 15 E3 licenses, and 5 E5 licenses based on our audited usage.” This positions you as an informed buyer and leads to a more accurate and cost-effective renewal agreement.
What Are the Most Common M365 Licensing Mistakes?
When it comes to Microsoft 365, it’s incredibly easy to overspend without even realizing it. Most businesses we work with are paying for features they don’t use or licenses they don’t need. The good news is that these common licensing mistakes are often simple to spot and fix once you know what to look for. A regular audit can uncover significant savings that go straight back to your bottom line. Let’s walk through the four most frequent missteps we see and how you can avoid them.
Giving Premium Licenses to Basic Users
This is the number one cause of budget bloat we find. It’s common for companies to assign a high-tier license, like Microsoft 365 E5, to every employee out of convenience. The problem is that an E5 license is packed with advanced analytics and security features that many of your team members simply don’t need. If an employee’s job revolves around email, Teams chats, and basic document collaboration in SharePoint, a Business Basic or Standard license is often a much better fit. Paying for premium features for a basic user is like buying a concert-grade guitar for someone who just wants to learn a few chords. A quick review of your team’s daily tasks can help you right-size your Microsoft 365 licenses and stop paying for unused tools.
Forgetting to Remove Licenses from Former Employees
When an employee leaves your company, their departure triggers a long checklist of offboarding tasks. Unfortunately, deactivating their M365 license often falls through the cracks. We’ve seen licenses remain active for 30, 60, or even 90 days post-departure, meaning you’re paying for a subscription that no one is using. If five employees leave in a year and their $50/month licenses stay active for two extra months each, you’ve wasted $500. This isn’t just a financial drain; it’s also a security risk. An unmonitored, licensed account is a potential backdoor into your network. Implementing a strict de-provisioning process as part of your cybersecurity strategy is essential for both your budget and your data protection.
Skipping a License Review After a Role Change
Your business is dynamic, and your employees grow and change roles within it. Someone might move from the sales team to a marketing position or get promoted from a junior to a senior role. When these internal shifts happen, their software needs often change, too. However, their M365 license usually stays the same. An employee who once needed the advanced data analytics in an E5 license might now only require the standard features of an E3. Without a process to review licenses during role changes, you end up with what we call “license creep,” where expensive permissions accumulate over time. Building a quick license check into your HR and management workflow for promotions and departmental moves can prevent this quiet but costly overspending.
Ignoring Security Needs When Downgrading
After identifying over-licensed users, the logical next step is to downgrade them to a more cost-effective plan. But this is where you have to be careful. While saving money is important, it should never come at the expense of security. Premium licenses like Microsoft 365 Business Premium or E5 include critical security features, such as Microsoft Defender and advanced threat protection. Downgrading a user who handles sensitive financial data or client information could strip away essential security layers, leaving your business vulnerable. Before making any changes, you must map the security requirements of each role to the features included in the license. A trusted managed IT support partner can help you find the right balance between cost optimization and risk management.
How Can You Negotiate Better M365 Renewal Terms?
Walking into your Microsoft 365 renewal discussion shouldn’t feel like you’re just accepting a bill. With the right preparation, you can turn it into a strategic conversation that aligns your costs with your actual needs. The key is to approach the negotiation with solid data, smart timing, and expert support. If you show up unprepared, you leave money on the table. But if you can clearly demonstrate exactly what you need (and what you don’t), you gain significant leverage to adjust your agreement. This process ensures you’re only paying for the tools your team actively uses, which can lead to substantial savings.
What Data Should You Bring to the Negotiation?
Data is the most powerful tool you have in a renewal negotiation. Simply knowing how many licenses you have isn’t enough. You need to show Microsoft you’ve done a deep dive into your usage. Before the meeting, generate reports that detail every license, including those that are inactive, unassigned, or duplicated. More importantly, identify users with licenses that are too powerful for their roles, like an employee with a Premium license who only uses email and Word. Presenting a report that shows 20% of your E5 licenses could be downgraded to E3 based on usage patterns gives you a concrete, data-backed reason to adjust your plan. This level of preparation shows you’re an informed customer, making it much harder for your needs to be challenged.
How to Time Your Renewal for Better Leverage
Many businesses make the mistake of waiting until the month before their renewal is due to review their licenses. This creates a stressful, last-minute scramble that rarely leads to the best outcome. Instead, you should treat license optimization as an ongoing process, not a one-time event. A great rule to implement is requiring departments to review and reclaim unused licenses before they can request new ones. By proactively managing your Microsoft 365 environment throughout the year, you build a continuous record of efficient use. This shifts the renewal from a frantic cost-cutting exercise to a simple validation of the smart decisions you’ve been making all along.
Should You Use a Partner or Renew Directly?
While you can always renew your licenses directly with Microsoft, working with an IT partner often puts you in a much stronger position. Experts agree that a detailed license review is the most critical part of any negotiation, and a good partner specializes in exactly that. As a Microsoft Partner, we help Tampa businesses navigate these complex renewals every day. We use specialized tools to conduct the deep-dive analysis needed to build your case, then we handle the negotiation for you. Our experience with IT consulting and Microsoft’s licensing structures allows us to secure terms and pricing that are often unavailable to businesses negotiating on their own.
How to Create a Repeatable License Review Process
Treating your Microsoft 365 license review as a once-a-year event is a recipe for stress and overspending. When you only look at licenses during renewal season, you’re forced to make rushed decisions based on old information. A much better approach is to build a simple, repeatable process that keeps your licensing aligned with your needs all year long. This turns license management from a frantic annual project into a routine operational task.
A consistent review process helps you catch unused licenses from former employees, adjust permissions for role changes, and ensure you aren’t paying for premium features that nobody uses. By making small, regular adjustments, you avoid the shock of a massive true-up bill and walk into renewal negotiations with total clarity on what you need. It’s about creating a system that works for you in the background, saving money and preventing headaches down the line.
Set a Review Cadence: Quarterly vs. Annually
Waiting for your annual renewal to audit licenses is one of the most common ways businesses waste money. A lot can change in a year: employees leave, new team members are hired, and roles shift. We strongly recommend setting a quarterly review cadence. A 90-day check-in is frequent enough to catch changes before they lead to significant costs but doesn’t create an administrative burden.
Think of it as a quick health check for your M365 environment. This regular rhythm allows you to reclaim licenses from offboarded employees promptly and re-evaluate if a user who changed departments still needs a premium license. This proactive approach ensures your license inventory stays lean and accurate throughout the year, making the annual renewal a much smoother, more predictable process.
Assign an Owner for License Management
A process is only as good as the person responsible for it. While it’s tempting to leave all license management to a single IT administrator, this often creates a bottleneck. Your admin may not know that the marketing team no longer uses a specific feature or that a user in accounting has been on leave for two months. A better strategy is to assign ownership and share management responsibilities with department leaders.
Department managers have the on-the-ground context to validate who needs what. By giving them visibility into their team’s licenses during your quarterly review, you empower them to make informed decisions. This shared accountability helps catch discrepancies faster and ensures the tools match the team’s actual work. As part of our managed IT support, we help Tampa businesses establish these exact workflows to streamline accountability.
What Tools Make License Monitoring Easier?
You can’t manage what you can’t see. While the Microsoft 365 Admin Center provides basic license information, it doesn’t always make it easy to spot waste. To get a clear picture, you need to create reports that show inactive accounts, unused licenses, and duplicate assignments. Many businesses use tools like Power BI to connect to their M365 data and build simple dashboards with key performance indicators (KPIs).
These dashboards can automatically flag licenses assigned to disabled accounts or users who haven’t logged in for over 90 days. They can also help you spot opportunities to downgrade a user from an E5 to an E3 license if they aren’t using premium security or analytics features. For businesses without the resources to build custom reports, our team uses specialized monitoring tools as part of our Microsoft 365 services to provide these insights automatically.
How IGTech365 Helps Tampa Businesses Optimize M365 Licensing
Managing Microsoft 365 licenses can feel like trying to solve a puzzle with constantly changing pieces. Many Tampa businesses we work with find they are overspending without even realizing it. At IGTech365, we turn that confusion into a clear, cost-saving strategy. Our process starts with a comprehensive license audit. We dig into your account to see exactly who is using what. It’s common to find active licenses assigned to former employees, temporary staff who have moved on, or even duplicate accounts. By identifying this waste right away, we can often find immediate savings.
Once we have a clean slate, we focus on matching the right license to the right person. Instead of assigning licenses by department, we look at specific job functions. An employee in marketing who lives in Teams and SharePoint has different needs than a field technician who only requires email and basic apps. This role-based approach ensures your team has the tools they need without paying for premium features they’ll never use. We help you build a Microsoft 365 environment that’s efficient and tailored to your actual operations, establishing clear governance policies so you stay in control of costs as your team grows and changes.
License optimization isn’t a one-time task you check off during renewal season. It’s an ongoing process. We treat it as a continuous part of our Managed IT Support. We help you establish a proactive review cadence, so you’re always ahead of the curve. When it is time to talk with Microsoft, you won’t be scrambling. We’ll have months of detailed usage data ready to go. This information gives you real leverage, empowering you to negotiate better terms and pricing based on what your business truly needs, not just what you used last year.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the quickest way to find savings on our M365 bill? The fastest way to cut costs is to look for two things: ghost users and over-licensed employees. Start by running a report of all your active licenses and comparing it against your current employee list. You will likely find you are still paying for licenses for former employees. Next, identify team members with premium licenses (like E5 or Business Premium) and check if they actually use the advanced features. If someone with a premium plan only uses Outlook and Teams, they are a perfect candidate for a more basic, less expensive license.
How often should we really be reviewing our licenses? While many companies wait for their annual renewal, a quarterly review is much more effective. A lot can happen in a year; people change roles, leave the company, or adopt new tools. A 90-day check-in allows you to catch these changes quickly, so you can reclaim unused licenses or adjust permissions before the costs add up. This turns license management into a simple, routine task instead of a stressful annual project.
Is it safe to downgrade an employee’s license to save money? Yes, it is safe as long as you do it thoughtfully. The key is to make sure the new, lower-tier license still meets the security requirements of that employee’s role. For example, you wouldn’t want to move an executive who handles sensitive company data from a Business Premium plan to a Basic plan, as you would lose critical threat protection features. The goal is to match the license to the job function, ensuring security is never compromised for savings.
What’s the real difference between Business Standard and Business Premium? The biggest difference is advanced security and device management. Business Standard is the go-to plan for most office workers because it includes the downloadable desktop versions of apps like Word and Excel. Business Premium includes all of that, plus a suite of security tools like Microsoft Defender and Intune. You would choose Premium for employees who handle sensitive client or financial data, or for anyone whose devices need to be managed to protect company information.
Can I just do this audit myself using the Admin Center? You can certainly get started in the Admin Center, and it’s a great place to spot obvious issues like licenses assigned to inactive accounts. However, the built-in reports don’t always show you the full picture, such as which specific features within a license are being used. To get the granular data needed to truly optimize your spending, you often need to connect your data to a tool like Power BI. This deeper analysis is what gives you a strong, evidence-based case for adjusting your license mix.